How the Astoria Fire of 1922 reshaped the community

On Dec. 8 1922, the city of Astoria was decimated by a fire. It destroyed over 200 businesses and displaced thousands of residents. News spread fast throughout the state as neighboring cities helped provide food and financial aid. With the loss of so many buildings and homes, talks and efforts to begin rebuilding the city began the next day. Chelsea Vaughn is the curator for Clatsop County Historical Society. She joins us to share the history of the fire and how it has reshaped the community.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. A little more than 100 years ago, in the early morning hours of December 8th, 1922, a fire tore through Oregon’s oldest city. Downtown Astoria was quickly devastated. Hundreds of businesses were destroyed, thousands of residents were displaced. The historian Chelsea Vaughn is the curator for the Clatsop County Historical Society. She joins us now to talk about the city’s destruction and its renewal. Chelsea Vaughn, welcome to the show.

Chelsea Vaughn: Hey, Dave, thanks for having me.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. I’d love to start the time before the fire. Can you give us a sense for what downtown Astoria would have been like?

Vaughn: Thinking about specifically right before the fire, it was the Christmas season of course. Downtown Astoria was full of businesses that had just really upped their stock. Importantly, they did not also up their insurance to correspond with the increased stock. Most of the businesses were grossly underinsured at this time because insurance companies did see Astoria as a major fire hazard. Many of our buildings were still built of wood, and perhaps more importantly, the city itself was built out over the river, first on wooden pilings, and then later with wooden viaducts forming our streets.

Miller: Wooden viaducts? So not just for water, but the actual under structure of streets were wooden boxes?

Vaughn: Basically yes, exactly.

Miller: How much do historians know about where and how and when the fire started?

Vaughn: We know the when and the where. The “how” remained a mystery all these years. The fire starts, as you mentioned in the early morning, slightly after 2am on December 8th 1922. It seems to start in the basement of what was a pool hall, the Thiel Brothers Pool Hall. Importantly, this was a wooden building, like so many. From there it quickly spreads next door to the department store called The Beehive, but also then it starts spreading not just building to building, but under the streets as well. So it begins popping up in unpredictable places, and spreads quite quickly.

Miller: It’s almost like the underground version of what we’ve heard a fair amount in recent years about the behavior of terrible forest fires, when huge embers can just fly up into the air and land half a mile down somewhere, and light another house or building on fire, here it was traveling underground as well as above ground.

Vaughn: Absolutely. And like I said, because it was traveling underground, it was incredibly unpredictable, it was hard to fight. But also importantly, because it’s traveling underground, the streets themselves collapsed and it collapsed our water system. So people at the time were suddenly fighting a fire without the existing infrastructure of water or electricity to aid them. We are a river town, so fortunately we are able to pump water out of the river to the fire to keep it under some sort of control, but it was quite chaotic.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the scale of the destruction?

Vaughn: Actually, the insurance report that was issued following the fire I believe says something to the effect of, “if you’re familiar with Astoria at all, it suffices to say that the whole downtown burned down.” It was about, I believe, 30 blocks or so, our entire downtown business district was simply decimated by the fire. At least 200, I say probably upwards of 300 businesses were destroyed in this fire, as well as at least 2,000 people were displaced from their residences.

Miller: Given what you described in terms of the infrastructure of the city below ground, and the fact that above ground so much of it was wooden frames and wooden everything else, and given the fact that huge urban fires were not uncommon at that time and earlier the 17th and 18th centuries, how much did local leaders or officials talk about these risks?

Vaughn: Well, it’s interesting because, Astoria itself, speaking of large urban fires, had actually burned down previously in 1883. That was, as you point out, not an uncommon thing at this time, Seattle quite famously burns down around that time. One thing though is that the city itself, rather than rebuilding largely with stone or masonry, they again re-build with wood. There certainly were some stone or masonry buildings, but the majority of them were wood. And again, initially we were on pilings, and the fact that the viaduct system was such a clear fire hazard, it created a situation like I mentioned. I believe that insurance companies actually charged more for insurance because of the fears of this. But also the fire chief himself, he was constantly bringing up concerns about how very dangerous the situation was.

Miller: Did people listen? And I guess I’m also wondering what listening would have even meant?

Vaughn: No, ultimately the expense of it all prevented city leadership from taking appropriate steps to correct the situation. At the same time, I can’t say that fully. There were some people who were beginning to construct in more fire resistant materials. We do have some buildings that notably survive the fire because of that very fact, though there’s also buildings that were assumed to be fire resistant because they were made of stone or brick that themselves were simply demolished and burnt down to nothing.

Miller: With all of this destruction, did people die?

Vaughn: Actually, interestingly there are three deaths associated with fire, but no one dies in the fire proper. There’s three deaths that are assumed that people would have probably not died had there not been a fire. One is a business owner, he had a car dealership, and he was attempting to push his vehicles out of line of the fire and he had a heart attack. Another one is a gentleman who worked on a boat. He seemingly misjudged distance and couldn’t see because of smoke, and fell off the boat and drowned. And the third was a presumed suicide, a man was found hanging from one of the piers the following morning. But again, no actual deaths in the fire itself, just deaths associated with the fire.

It’s quite fortunate frankly, because most people were asleep at this time. It was the efforts of people who were awake, going around and waking everyone else up and getting them out of their beds in the early morning, people being safe. Well, “safe” is an exaggeration, because honestly people were milling about in the streets trying to save their stuff, and all kinds of things that, by our modern ideas of fire, would never participate in.

Miller: The word you used earlier, and I think the word you used in an article you wrote for The Daily Astoria, was “chaos” to describe the actions of Astorians, and this went on for something like 11 hours or more. What have you been able to learn about what those hours were like for people in the city?

Vaughn: I think chaos is absolutely what it seemingly was like. Because the fire was unpredictable, because it was going on for a long time, because business owners were underinsured or individuals were not insured at all for such a thing, people had understood that if they lost things in the fire, they lost them permanently. There were people trying to save their things, the goods from their store or possessions from their home. There’s looting going on during this time. Also, people are underestimating how big the fire is eventually going to be. They are getting all of their items out of their apartments, getting down to the sidewalk thinking they’re safe, having to then move block down because the fire is coming, and then doing that two or three more times before finally having to abandon their stuff when the fire just gets too close and it gets too dangerous.

While this is happening, we also have the ammunition in the sporting goods stores exploding, the gas tanks associated with the various car dealerships and garages are exploding. People are actually dynamiting buildings trying to create a fire block. Veterans of the First World War actually described this as “being back in the trenches.” It was complete and utter chaos.

Miller: The dynamiting of buildings to basically make an urban fire line. This is what wild fire fighting crews do, cutting down trees to stop the spread to get rid of the fuel, and people were doing that with houses, or with buildings in downtown Astoria?

Vaughn: Yeah, with buildings. Most of the residential houses are relatively unscathed. But yes, absolutely, they were exploding the downtown buildings trying to prevent the fire from going further.

Miller: Did that work?

Vaughn: It’s debatable. Generally we say yes, it was one of the tactics that succeeded. But also, at least initially, some people talk about the dynamite not being of the caliber to actually destroy the buildings, all it did was break the windows and let the fire get inside. So it seemingly, in the end, was one of multiple tactics that slowed the fire, eventually stopped the fire. But I’ve read some mixed accounts of how people thought that was effective or not.

Miller: Where did the thousands of displaced people live while homes were being rebuilt?

Vaughn: A variety of places. So like I said, most of the residential homes survive. A lot of residents of Astoria proper open their homes to people who need places to stay. Nearby communities do something similar, the beach community of Seaside for example, the hotels there let people stay there. But also ultimately, a lot of people who are displaced. Our population does shrink after that time. A lot of people who were displaced may have been seasonal workers, they were living in rooming houses, apartments and that like. We have many accounts of people being taken and taken care of, but also we know the population does decline dramatically following the fire.

Miller: And then the rebuilding process started. What was that like?

Vaughn: It was rapid. Obviously in the immediate aftermath of the fire, people are concerned about food shelter, things of that like. But basically the day after the fire happened, people were already talking about rebuilding.

Because the streets were on viaducts, they basically had collapsed onto themselves. So before you could simply rebuild, they had to actually rebuild the streets and all the infrastructure to go with that. So in the immediate aftermath, businesses moved to other buildings that are outside the fire zone or they quickly threw up small businesses or small wooden structures along streets that had not been destroyed while the downtown was then rebuilt. We have what’s called the chair rail system, which is sort of an odd concrete system now under our city in which the utilities are buried under our streets. We were one of the first cities to do that.

And then pretty quickly, businesses start going in. One of the first businesses to really be focused upon was the Astoria Hotel. It was started before the fire, but then with so many people being displaced and the perceived need for housing, they actually made the hotel larger than originally intended. We have a photo that’s taken eight months after the fire and you already see several buildings have been rebuilt and businesses already going back into the downtown commercial district. So it happens quite quickly.

Miller: Chelsea Vaughn, thanks very much for your time today.

Vaughn: Thank you.

Miller: Chelsea Vaughn is the curator for Clatsop County Historical Society.

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